Clockwise from top left: Joshua Harmon, Francine Volpe, Sibyl Kempson, Theresa Rebeck, David West Read and Lisa D’Amour.Credit
Clockwise from top center: Dailyn Rodriguez; Cathryn Lynn; Patrick Randak/NBC; Robert Caplin for The New York Times; Zack Smith

CALL me Ishmael. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Throw in Tolstoy’s uniquely unhappy families, Orwell’s 13-striking clocks and Nabokov’s loin-firing Lolita, and literature is packed with gangbuster first lines.

Theater doesn’t seem to concern itself with front-loading quite as much, maybe because it’s a lot easier to put down an unsatisfying book after Page 2 than it is to leave your seat at 8:03 p.m. Still, that doesn’t prevent playwrights from laboring long and hard over the first words we hear. “I never can get very far until I get the first line right,” says the prolific A. R. Gurney, who over his career has written more than 40 such lines. “Well begun is half-done.”

To get a sense of how and why they begin the way they do, Eric Grode spoke with several writers of new plays. These excerpts from their comments (and stage directions) have been edited and condensed, but the lines from their plays are quoted verbatim.

Bad Jews

By Joshua Harmon

OPENS Tuesday at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater.

PREMISE A young man and woman in their nightclothes interact in his apartment.

DAPHNAI’m sorry but I still, I mean — you can see the Hudson River! From the bathroom! This apartment ... Really, Jonah? Boxers and black socks? Is that supposed to do it for me? Let me — I would never want you to do it for me, you’re my cousin and, gross. Just, like, if you’re at all interested in people of the opposite sex who are not your cousins? [She gestures at his current get-up.] Don’t.

MR. HARMON “My play takes place in real time in one space, so the later I can start the action, the better. Her coming out of the bathroom is the latest possible beginning. I don’t think that first line will ever get a laugh, but it establishes that she doesn’t live there, and it hopefully sends a message about the tone, which is super important in a comedy. Also, when you see a man and a woman dressed like this, you assume they’re romantically involved. So I had to get the cousin reference in there.”

The Good Mother

By Francine Volpe

IN PREVIEWS, opens Nov. 15 at the Acorn Theater at Theater Row.

PREMISE Primping for an evening out, a young mother natters on to her baby sitter.

LARISSA I’ll never forget what else he said to me he said — and it’s a simple thing he said — he said, he said to me anyway he looks at me and he says, he looks at me and he says he goes: “Remember who you are.” ... What do you mean? Who am I? I don’t know who I am, who am I supposed to be? What am I supposed to remember? I’m a child.

MS. VOLPE “This line woke me up in the middle of the night in my freezing loft in Williamsburg. I had a phone conversation with my father that ended with: ‘One more thing: Remember who you are.’ I don’t belabor the first line of my plays. (I mean, I belabor every line I’ve ever written.) But in this play and many others the line presented itself to me. And as a writer you have to assume that something stirring within you is going to stir within others too.”

Ich, Kürbisgeist

By Sibyl Kempson

OPENS Monday at the Chocolate Factory.

PREMISE What began as a (relatively) straightforward Halloween play has become an “olde-tyme agricultural vengeance play” written in an invented language.

MS. KEMPSON “When I began writing this, I was performing a lot and touring in foreign countries. And the idea became that experience of being in a country long enough that you start to pick up little pieces of their language but not most of it. When I’m at a play and taking it all in — the actors and the set and the world of the play — I never remember the first few lines. And so I try to undervalue them a bit. I find that they get wasted.”

Wild With Happy

By Colman Domingo

THROUGH Nov. 11 at the Public Theater.

PREMISE The 40-year-old protagonist recalls an encounter from when he was 10.

GIL As a matter of fact, the last time I was in a church it was very upsetting!

MR. DOMINGO “He’s mid-conversation because he’s mid-conflict. Playwrights like August Wilson take their time settling into a conflict, whereas I think my generation dives right in. I shifted a lot around in this prologue — I’m on Draft No. 80, I believe — but I never changed the first line.”

Detroit

By Lisa D’amour

THROUGH Sunday at Playwrights Horizons.

PREMISE A hostess tries to entertain her guests while dealing with a balky patio umbrella.

MARY And the man with the birthmark looked up and slid a handwritten receipt across the table to me. He said, “Is there anything else I can help you with,” and I said no thank you and I turned and walked out onto the wooden pier and I saw a very old sea gull swoop down into the water and eat a fish.

MS. D’AMOUR “When I started writing the play, I knew the situation — I knew that Mary was telling the dream because she’s a nervous host and the umbrella isn’t working. Not only is the dream life really important in the play, but the economic anxiety that I deal with is in there too. Now was I conscious of all that when I wrote the line? No. But the first few minutes are very important to lay down the DNA of the play.”

Photo

Colman Domingo in the first scene of “Wild With Happy,” which he also wrote, at the Public Theater.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

The Performers

By David West Read

IN PREVIEWS, opens Nov. 14 at the Longacre Theater.

PREMISE A celebrated pornographic-film star has reunited with an old classmate, now a journalist.

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MANDREW What is a porn star? Good question. That’s the first good question you’ve asked all day.

MR. READ “Picking up in the middle of the action is always better. There’s a period at the beginning of any play where the audience is leaving its cares away and entering this world. It’s not instantaneous. And I thought starting with a question — and a provocative question — would sort of speed up that process.”

Dead Accounts

By Theresa Rebeck

OPENS Nov. 29 at the Music Box Theater.

PREMISE Jack, a high-strung New Yorker, returns to his childhood home in Cincinnati and descends on cartons of a local brand of ice cream.

JACK This stuff is awesome. Does it still have the giant chunks in it? Like if you get lucky you can find just a, I love that, those giant chunks of, this stuff is amazing.

MS. REBECK “Most of my plays are comedies, and the fact is that audiences don’t know what to laugh at until you establish that world for them. So it’s essential to find that first laugh right off the bat. This line nails Jack’s essence, which is this hunger to fill his soul. Whereas [his sister] Lorna stayed at home, and her next line — ‘Do you want a bowl?’ — sets up the contrast and the yin-yang between them. And maybe, hopefully, we’ll get a laugh on it.”

MS. ENSLER “There’s this internalized monologue constantly going on inside girls’ heads about who they’re told they’re supposed to be. And I think Facebook has become the land in which so many of these girls are determining their identity. So I decided to focus on one person and then bring it out.”

Heresy

By A.R. Gurney

THROUGH Nov. 4 at the Flea Theater

PREMISE A National Guard intern prepares for the arrival of two concerned parents in this political parable.

MARK O.K. Send ’em on up. [He goes upstage to his computer and begins to tap in information. Mary and Joe enter from the hall.] Be with you momentarily, folks. Just setting up your folder. [Mary and Joe wait. Mark finishes.] There. Welcome.

MR. GURNEY “Any playwright will tell you that they spend a huge amount of time on their opening lines. Even the way you say ‘Welcome’ matters. Without giving too much away, Mark is not even looking at them as he says it. He’s just going through his shpiel. And so we see that he’s a functionary and barely even a human being.”

AliceGraceAnon

By Kara Lee Corthron

THROUGH Nov. 9 at the Irondale Center

PREMISE In telling three separate narratives simultaneously, Ms. Corthron also had to decide which story to begin with. She ultimately decided to begin with the third character in the title, the anonymous protagonist of the 1970s “Go Ask Alice.”

ANONYMOUS Nobody knows who I am.

MS. CORTHRON “She’s kind of the one person who could be all of us. People know what to expect from Grace Slick or Alice in Wonderland [the other two protagonists], so I wanted to start in a quieter, more contemplative place. … I really try not to put too much stock in the first line. I have enough of a perfectionist streak that I can really get stuck otherwise.”

PREMISE A man named Michael Kiriakos stands holding an envelope that links him and his family to the Armenian genocide of 1915.

MICHAEL There are sins, from which we can never be absolved. Sins, so terrible, so … unimaginable, that if, or when, we finally acknowledge the depths of our complicity, we will be changed forever. We will drift through the rest of our days on earth not as human beings, but as specters. Soulless and empty, continually muttering a single prayer. Not for forgiveness, because we know that for us, forgiveness doesn’t exist. Not to forget, because the memory of our crime is the only source of genuine emotion we will ever know again. [A beat.] What we will pray for, very simply, is death. There are – [A beat.] There are sins, from which we can never be absolved. I know this … because I have committed one.

MR. DINELARIS “This play is always straddling Michael’s personal journey as well as the Armenian genocide, and so I wanted this particular line to address both. … It’s repeated at the end, when you look at it through a different lens. We’re always looking for that surprising inevitability: I can’t believe this is happening, and yet I always knew this would happen. And so the opening of the play starts you on that path.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 28, 2012, on Page AR9 of the New York edition with the headline: How to Find Opening Lines That Electrify. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe